Alex Van Halen has revealed he's still angry over Eddie Van Halen's legendary guest spot on Michael Jackson's Beat It, which the late electric guitar legend recorded without telling his bandmates.
Talking to UK newspaper The Guardian to promote his new memoir, Brothers, Alex revealed his brother had tracked his now-iconic solo for the pop hit in secret at a time of great tensions within the band.
As The Guardian reports, the band were coming apart by 1982, owing to heightened internal creative and personal tensions in the Van Halen camp: vocalist David Lee Roth felt jealous of “Ed’s status as a creative colossus”, while Van Halen himself felt stifled by producer Ted Templeman's discouragement of his solos.
So, when Eddie recorded his Beat It solo without his bandmates knowing, tensions reached breaking point.
“What the fuck are you doing playing on that record?” Alex recalled saying when he found out about Eddie's guest spot (via the Guardian). “Don’t you realize you only have so many great solos in you? Don’t give one to Michael Jackson!’”
The drummer says Roth ultimately used Eddie’s moonlighting as a way out of the band, reportedly eying greater fame in his own right on the silver screen and stage: “He was delusional,” Alex Van Halen retorts. “He’s not an actor.”
As GW scribe Jackson Maxwell reflects, Beat It was “a watershed moment in pop music,” with the song marrying a dancefloor-friendly R&B pomp with swaggering guitar riffs and a virtuosic electric guitar solo.
In Jackson’s own words, he had wanted to write “the type of song that I would buy if I were to buy a rock song”, and so both Eddie and Steve Lukather were brought onboard. Having recently topped the charts with Toto at the time, Lukather helped flesh out the song’s skeleton – including its masterful riff – before Eddie added the flair-laced icing.
A watershed moment or not, 42 years later, Alex's rage over Eddie's secret fretboard-burning rendezvous is still white hot.
“Why would you lend your talents to Michael Jackson? I just don’t fucking get it,” he also told Rolling Stone during a recent mic-drop-a-minute interview. “And the funny part was that Ed fibbed his way out of it by saying, ‘Oh, who knows that kid anyway?’ You made the mistake! Fess up. Don’t add insult to injury by acting stupid.”
That interview has made plenty of headlines already, with Alex lifting the lid on how an Ozzy-fronted Van Halen album, and a project with Chris Cornell, nearly came to fruition.
He’s also blamed David Lee Roth’s reported unwillingness to pay tribute to Eddie, who passed in 2020, during the much-discussed reunion shows as the reason why the shows never happened.
The candid conversation also saw him suggest that AI may be used to finish Van Halen demos. Alex says he has reached out to Open AI to analyze “the patterns of how Edward would have played something” to round out unfinished material.
